“It used to be when productivity went up in America, everybody got to share. The people who caused the productivity increase, they got to share. They got a piece of the action,” the vice president said last month. “Something is wrong.”

Biden was citing research by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which suggests that in recent years, workers’ wages have stopped increasing even though investments in technology and equipment are still allowing them to produce more per hour on the job. Clinton has used the same figures in her campaign.

Elise Gould and Josh Bivens are the rare economists who cut across that divide. Both work at the Economic Policy Institute and generally support the Affordable Care Act. But both argue that the Cadillac tax is a bad policy that could lead to Americans skipping out on needed medical care. They think, much like most politicians, that the United States would be better off scrapping the new fee altogether.

Tapping into a common refrain, Sanders delved into the “crisis” of youth unemployment. He pointed to June research from the Economic Policy Institute that found nearly 20 percent of high school graduates ages 17 to 20 are unemployed and 37 percent are underemployed. (That research also found that 51 percent of young black high school graduates are underemployed).

It’s incredible that we’ve built a society that relies on women in the labor force yet makes no discernible effort to deal with this problem. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, recently divided the country into 618 “family budget areas” and determined that in more than 500 of them, the cost of child care for a family with a 4-year-old and an 8-year old would exceed housing costs. Also, if you’re a working single mother with those same two children in, say, Buffalo, child care probably eats up a third of your income.

African-Americans make up nearly half of the District of Columbia’s population of more than 650,000. But the unemployment rate among the city’s African-Americans is 15.8 percent, according to the progressive Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of official data. That’s more than twice the city’s overall jobless rate of 7.7 percent and more than five times white Washingtonians’ unemployment rate of 2.9 percent.

After a surprisingly weak series of employment reports and a good, but not great, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released Friday, many analysts are beginning to question the state of the domestic labor market. Long hailed as one of the healthiest aspects of the domestic economy, it seems the state of employment in the U.S. is beginning to sag. “There is still a significant gap between the number of people looking for jobs and the number of job openings,” Elise Gould, senior economist and director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a research note Friday. She cited a “broad-based lack of demand for workers” and “meager wage growth and employment growth” as “more evidence of a slow-moving economy.”

In February, Florida’s auditor general issued its findings that during a four-month period in 2014, 44 percent of the more than 408,000 claims processed were simply sent off into the web equivalent of the Twilight Zone. Applicants were instructed to submit their Social Security numbers, even though that was not a requirement. Moreover, the audit found weak security protections. In March, the Economic Policy Institutereported that 81.3 percent of the state’s short-term unemployed had received no benefits last year.

Any increase would have major consequences in Texas, because we have so many low-wage workers and a high poverty rate. If the pay floor rose to $12 an hour by 2020, almost 3.5 million Texans would get a bump, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

No one has to tell working parents how ridiculously expensive child care has become in this country. Still, a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., certainly puts an eye-opening exclamation point on that fact. That study showed that a year of child care for a 4-year-old costs about 16 percent more than a year’s tuition at UNC Chapel Hill.

Lawrence wrote that while the image concerns that pushed her to take the deal could be chalked up to being young – or part of her personality – there was maybe something deeper in play. “Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? We’ve only been able to vote for what, 90 years? I’m seriously asking – my phone is on the counter and I’m on the couch, so a calculator is obviously out of the question. Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?” she wrote. (A study by the Economic Policy Institute in April found that “at the median, women’s hourly wages are only 83 percent of men’s hourly wages.”)

But the real concern is that this new rule will draw attention to an unflattering comparison. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that among the largest publicly owned U.S. firms, CEOs make over 300 times the salary of a median worker. In 2014, chief executives at these top 350 companies earned 16.3 million on average.

Perhaps the most data-driven work on the program is Ms. Harting’s, drawn from a graph created by the Economic Policy Institute, using data generated by Messrs. Pinketty and Saez. The data, which come from the period 1979 to 2007, show income growth for the bottom 90% staying relatively stagnant, sometimes even dropping into negative territory, before hitting 5% in the final year. The line representing the top 1% of households, meanwhile, ends up 224%.

This is the main statistic used to argue that the middle class is struggling mightily. If you take inflation into account, the typical family’s income is lower today than it was in 1995,according to analysis of census data by the Economic Policy Institute…

Still, there’s little evidence that 401(k)s will be as significant a source of income for retirees as pensions were back in the day, said Monique Morrisey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who did the analysis. “There’s very little money in these things [401(k)s],” she told HuffPost. “Yes, they’re gonna increase, but not enough.”

Sadly, these conditions are hardly unique in the Apple supply chain. As the political economist Isaac Shapiro explained on the Economic Policy Institute website, Apple’s 2014 report acknowledged a compliance rate regarding its own standards of only 70 percent—down from 77 a year earlier. Its enforcement of the hours these workers put in is also down from the previous year. They are exploited this way despite the fact that Apple’s labor costs amount to a tiny fraction of its profits, especially given the fantastically generous compensation packages its top executives enjoy. Shapiro pointed out that in 2011 and 2012, the top nine members of Apple’s executive team received compensation packages equal to that of fully 90,000 Chinese factory workers.

Still, being on track to get hit and actually paying the tax are different things, says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. “Health insurance providers are going to provide plans that are cheaper,” she says. “And, all else equal, cheaper plans are thinner plans — which means that consumers are going to have to pay more out-of-pocket.”

The second argument made for raising the minimum wage is that it hasn’t kept up with the growth in productivity. According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity it would be $18.67 an hour. The problem with this metric is that a wage is not based on the productivity of the entire economy, but rather the productivity of the individual, the firm, and the industry itself. For a more accurate measure we must look at the productivity of the specific industries that employ minimum wage workers.

The restaurant industry, for instance, employs about 10 million people in the U.S. and is growing. However, the jobs are mostly low-wage, with very few benefits. Waitresses make an average of $10.15 per hour, a figure that already includes tips, and one in six restaurant workers lives below the poverty line, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign has said previously that he is using research from the Economic Policy Institute that uses a different, broader definition of unemployment that includes people with a part-time job who want full-time work and people who are not actively looking for a job because they think there are few opportunities. The E.P.I. data also uses a slightly different age bracket to calculate “youth unemployment” — from age 17 to 20 — and the data is limited to high school graduates.

Sanders’s figures come from a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. (Our friends at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have fact-checked this claim, and Sanders’s staff has pointed to this report.) The report shows that minority youths are less likely to have a job than white youths, and that black youths traditionally have had high unemployment rates.

Sanders’s statistics refer to high school graduates between 17 and 20 years old and not enrolled in additional schooling. This report is different from the official unemployment rate as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS does not specifically break out data for the 17- to 20-year-old age range. Instead, this report looks at employment status for high school graduates who are unemployed, working part-time and “marginally attached to the labor force” (meaning, “those who want a job and have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work in the last four weeks”).

There is certainly an employment crisis among minority youth. But as he has done in the past, Sanders may have misspoken when he cited those statistics. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has found that 51.3% of black and 36.1% Hispanic high school graduates, age 17 to 20, are underemployed. That means they either don’t have a job, aren’t working as many hours as they would like or aren’t currently looking for work but would like a job.

For most Americans who are paid by the hour, wages have either fallen or remained flat for more than a decade, according to a report issued by the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank based in Washington. The institute called wage stagnation “the country’s central economic challenge.”

“It tends to be assumed that if we have growth, people’s hourly wages will improve,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute. “In fact, that has not been the case since 2002, whether you have a college degree or not. And for the most part, this issue has not been confronted by economic policy makers.”

After a catastrophic financial crisis and 15 years of declining incomes for typical American households, Democrats seem to have diminishing confidence in the potential of the free market to provide an improving standard of living. “Bill Clinton said, ‘The era of big government is over,’ ” recalled Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, citing the former president’s State of the Union address in 1996. “Democrats for a long time have run from the notion that government can be — often is — the only solution to certain problems.”

Roughly 8.7 million jobs vanished during the last recession. Since the downturn ended, however, men have encountered less trouble getting back to work, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Between February 2010 and June 2014, men gained 5.5 million jobs while women gained 3.6 million.

According to some experts, the American system is not only bad for workers, but for the entire economy. Employment in the restaurant industry has grown by 80 percent since 1990, and because those workers are making less than the regular minimum wage, the country as a whole has lost spending power. “Restaurants have never had to internalize their real labor costs,” David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said. “The restaurant industry is still the Wild West in terms of labor standards.”

The reasons for declines in US labour force participation, which measures people in work or looking for a post, are complex and heavily contested. However, experts believe one driver is threadbare support for working parents. “We don’t have the same incentives other countries have for women to stay in the labour force after they have kids,” said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC.

The issues of stagnant wages and wealth inequity will dominate the discussion before next year’s presidential election — and unleash some unusual political dynamics, predicts a leading labor economist. “It will be one of the main topics in the presidential election next year,” said Lawrence Mishel, who has closely studied the issue. Mishel is president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a liberal think tank. But he criticized Democrats and Republicans alike at the Pathways From Poverty breakfast, sponsored by the Colorado Center on Law & Policy, on Friday at the History Colorado Center. Since 1973, worker productivity has risen 73 percent, according to an EPI analysis. Higher productivity should result in higher wages, Mishel said, but that link is broken, a reflection of deliberate policy decisions by both parties over several administrations.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute took a look at the current minimum wage in each state, compared it to the average cost of child care and computed how much of the annual income those costs eat up. It’s not a pretty picture. While federal guidelines say child care should consume no more than 10 percent of a family’s income, the cost of infant care is more than half of a full-time minimum-wage worker’s total earnings in 37 states. The cost of care for a 4-year-old is more than half of total salary in 20 states, according to the study released this week. “Child care is simply out of reach for workers who support their families on minimum-wage jobs,” the institute says.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.